1 research outputs found
Refined a posteriori error estimation for classical and pressure-robust Stokes finite element methods
Recent works showed that pressure-robust modifications of mixed finite
element methods for the Stokes equations outperform their standard versions in
many cases. This is achieved by divergence-free reconstruction operators and
results in pressure independent velocity error estimates which are robust with
respect to small viscosities. In this paper we develop a posteriori error
control which reflects this robustness.
The main difficulty lies in the volume contribution of the standard
residual-based approach that includes the -norm of the right-hand side.
However, the velocity is only steered by the divergence-free part of this
source term. An efficient error estimator must approximate this divergence-free
part in a proper manner, otherwise it can be dominated by the pressure error.
To overcome this difficulty a novel approach is suggested that uses arguments
from the stream function and vorticity formulation of the Navier--Stokes
equations. The novel error estimators only take the of the
right-hand side into account and so lead to provably reliable, efficient and
pressure-independent upper bounds in case of a pressure-robust method in
particular in pressure-dominant situations. This is also confirmed by some
numerical examples with the novel pressure-robust modifications of the
Taylor--Hood and mini finite element methods